The Senate eviscerated the energy bill, taking out the long-term production tax credits, the renewable portfolio standard, and reducing the role of renewables dramatically. A disappointing outcome from a disappointing body. Here’s a professional story on the subject via Renewable Energy Access:

After a hard-fought battle on the political playing field, the renewable energy industries have suffered a difficult defeat. The Senate voted yesterday evening on an Energy Bill that left out the investment and production tax credits and a renewable portfolio standard (RPS), avoiding a Presidential veto but dramatically reducing the role of renewables in Congress’ energy plan.

The Bill passed by a vote of 85-12. It now goes back to the House for approval and then to the President to be signed into law. The White House issued a statement yesterday saying that it would accept the Bill.

Read more…

This TED Talk by Amory Lovins filmed in 2005 is well worth the investment of 20 minutes. He has posted his book, The Oil Endgame, on a website with a free download. Check it out.

An associate recently referred a text book to our attention: Geothermal Power Plants: Principles, Applications, and Case Studies. (A second edition is due to be released this month.)

Have you ever wanted to understand or model hydrothermal reservoir characteristics? Have you ever wanted to simply grok what a hydrothermal reservoir is? Would you like to be able to model/understand the thermodynamic characteristics of a hybrid flash-binary geothermal harvest system? Would you like to know where geothermal plants are installed, their conversion method, and capacity? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this is the book for you.

DiPippo does an admirable job in making the material accessible to all, yet including the deep technical details and formulae required to perform analysis of geothermal projects.

Via Renewable Energy Access:

Northern California Power Agency (NCPA) and SPG Solar, announced that they will together to build a 1 megawatt (MW) single-axis solar tracking system that will provide renewable energy to an existing pump station that supplies the NCPA Geysers Geothermal Energy Plant.

The array will be used to collect solar power to pump wastewater into the geysers, which is in turn used to generate geothermal power. The photovoltaic array will start generating clean renewable power beginning in September 2008.

The $8.2 million installation consists of 6,300 solar modules that will produce 2.2 million kilowatt hours of electricity annually. The solar plant will supplant PG&E-provided grid power that had been powering the pumps.

Read more…

NCPA operates two geothermal plants at the Geysers producing approximately 132MW gross, and 120MW net of electricity. In the late 1990’s, in an attempt to regain pressure in the rapidly declining Geysers field, NCPA and other operators at the Geysers entered into an agreement with Lake County to reclaim the treated waste water, pipe it to the Geysers, and reinject it into the reservoir. This is necessary because nearly 70% of the mass extracted from the reservoir is released into the atmosphere during operations of the power plants and natural recharge was not matching the pace of extraction.

NCPA Geothermal Plant at the Geysers

The good news is this scheme to replace mined mass has worked; so much so, that Calpine followed suit and created a similar agreement with Santa Rosa. The bad news is, it takes power to move the millions of gallons of water from Lake County to the injection wells. The pipeline is about 30 miles (50 km) and gains nearly 2,000 feet (600 m) in elevation over the course of its run. The load to run the pipeline operations is about 8MW, or two-thirds of the parasitic load borne by the NCPA plants.

So, in practical terms, the application of solar energy to power some of the pumping operations should be characterized as an experiment in multi-dimensional harvest. The other opportunities NCPA and the other Geysers operators have (given the location and transmission infrastructure) are straight-forward bottom cycling using the new generation units from UTC power further harvesting heat from the steam exhaust from the turbines and wind turbine installation. This is the approach Montara Energy Ventures is taking with its Sou Hills Prospect.

The Geothermal Resources Council has recently made a new resource available for its members. The organization has taken over 3,000 technical articles produced in the GRC Transactions and Special Reports and posted them in a research library. This will be an incredibly valuable resource to those interested in geothermal electricity production.

Access the GRC Research Library.

For no particular reason, here’s a photo of a geothermal plant. Enjoy!

Soda Lake Geothermal Plant